The troubles of dealing with Anderson Silva and other UFC superstars

After Anderson Silva successfully defended his UFC middleweight title against Chael Sonnen for the second time, UFC President Dana White sat down in front of reporters and tried, as best he could, to explain to us what it was like to work with the world’s greatest fighter.

“I swear to God, it’s like dealing with an artist,” White said. “It’s like dealing with an artist or some big, crazy, talented actor. That’s what it’s like.”

The thing is, White wasn’t complaining. In a weird way that he couldn’t totally explain, he actually liked dealing with the difficult, brilliant champion, he said. It’s a good thing too, because it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get any easier any time soon, which might be the natural consequence of having an MMA legend under contract.

As you’ve probably heard, White wants Silva on hand at UFC 154 this weekend in order to get a head start on promoting a potential superfight with Georges St-Pierre, assuming the UFC welterweight champ is victorious against Carlos Condit in the night’s pay-per-view headliner. You can imagine how White envisions the whole thing going down. Two champions in the same cage, a tense faceoff, maybe a couple words exchanged or even just a tough guy nod or two. Boom, you’ve already got your first promo materials for the fight of the decade.

But now Silva isn’t so sure he wants to do that. He’ll go to Montreal to watch the fight, he told Tatame, but he’s not interested in any in-cage PR stunts.

Silva also said he wants to take most the next year off – despite the fact that he’s already in his late 30s, and for all he cares the UFC can go ahead and create some interim title for other middleweights to fight over in his absence. Whatever. Silva’s on vacation. For now he seems mostly interested in filming an action movie. And we all know how much White loves it when his fighters decide they want to be actors.

Put yourselves in White’s shoes for just a moment. Here you are, so close to a potential once-in-a-generation mega-fight between the pound-for-pound best fighter in the world and the pound-for-pound biggest PPV draw in the UFC, and that’s when one of your champions decides he wants to take a vacation? To go do some crappy movie? When the clock might already be running out on the best years of his career? Picture the empty stadium. See the money left on the table. You can almost feel White’s ulcer forming somewhere deep in his gut.

This is the problem with superstars. They become so big and famous, make so much money, and accumulate so much clout that no one can tell them what to do anymore, not even the boss. He can suggest. He can plead and negotiate and argue. But he can’t insist. How could he? With what could the UFC president possibly hope to threaten Silva? He’s not going to fire him or strip him of his title. And so he’s stuck, trying to make a deal, hoping to dangle enough carrots in front of the champ to get him to take the obvious next step.

It must be maddening at times, and yet it’s still better than the alternative. Better to have a difficult, mercurial superstar than no superstar at all. Better still to have a superstar such as GSP, who somehow remains relatively easy and compliant even while pocketing tons of cash both in the cage and outside of it, which might explain why White told me in a recent interview, “I wish I had 400 Georges St-Pierres.”

Sure, he might have mostly been talking about the man’s talent and marketability, but it was also a reference to his attitude. GSP seems to be that rare superstar who doesn’t insist on wielding that power just to prove to himself that he has it.

Then again, that calm, rational sensibility can also make him seem boring at times. Dealing with the uber-gifted artist type might be frustrating because you never know what he’s going to do next (action movie with Lyoto Machida, for instance), but it’s also endlessly exciting because you never know what he’s going to do next (back up and let Stephan Bonnar take his best shot, for instance).

This is the deal with the devil that you make when you cultivate a superstar. The mid-tier fighters and wanna-be contenders might fight a silverback gorilla on two days’ notice if White asked them to, but superstars won’t. They don’t have to.

The question I always come back to with Silva is, how much of this temperamental artist stuff is a calculated ploy, and how much is real? This is the same guy who volunteered to do a light-heavyweight fight on short notice (albeit a pretty easy one) because he felt like every fighter should do his part to help the company. So he said. Now he’s telling us he’s taking most of 2013 off, superfight or no, and he doesn’t much care what the UFC does about the belt in the meantime? It smacks of a negotiating ploy, which might be part of what White was referring to when he talked about the frustrations of dealing with him. It could be that the frustration stems from just how savvy Silva is, and how much power he knows he has.

On one hand it’s a little worrisome. Isn’t this how boxing got to be the sport where the mega-stars never fight, by making each big time champion a promotion unto himself? At the same time, maybe it’s unavoidable. Maybe that’s part of having stars. The greater they are, the harder it is to get them to do what you want.

Just keeping asking, pleading, arguing. Keep adding zeroes to the paycheck. See if he isn’t feeling differently about what is and is not in his character then. Seems like one way or another, White usually gets his way in the end.

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